I really struggled with this. No one writes violence and unrest quite as poetically as Mahfouz, but the unrelenting allegory of it all really bogged me down. It's like the narrative is constantly requiring you to interrogate the biblical / koranic / torahic echoes in every sentence, or else you are reading it wrong. I've put this down last year, thinking that I needed the time and space, but it still wasn't a pleasurable read.